From OCS Inventory NG

Presentation

You can easily extend the inventoried information thank to the modular architecuture of OCS. You'll just need a basic Perl knowledge.

The backend module are Perl module localized in Ocsinventory-Agent-XXX/lib/Ocsinventory/Agent/Backend. Your new backend module will be autodetected by the agent during it's start up.

# The complet name of the package
# the path MUST be valid or the package won't be loaded
package Ocsinventory::Agent::Backend::OS::Linux;

use strict;

# I need to declare $runAfter because of the strict mode 
use vars qw($runAfter);

# The package must be run after OS::Generic
$runAfter = ["Ocsinventory::Agent::Backend::OS::Generic"];

# This is the check function. The agent runs it just once the module is loaded.
# If the function return false, the module and its children are not executed
# eg: OS::Linux and OS::Linux::* won't executed if this run() function return
# false
# It's a easy way to target a module just for a system like Linux in this case.
sub check { $^O =~ /^linux$/ }

# its the main function of the script, it's called during the hardware inventory
sub run {
  my $params = shift; # I fetch the parameter

# I need to get the inventory object to update it
  my $inventory = $params->{inventory};

  chomp (my $osversion = `uname -r`);
# I get the OS version

# and I updated the information collected
  $inventory->setHardware({
      OSNAME => "Linux",
      OSCOMMENTS => "Unknow Linux distribution",
      OSVERSION => $osversion
    });
}

1;

Some remarks

You can start the agent directly without any installation. You'll just need the dependancy installed:

$gunzip Ocsinventory-Agent-XXX.tar.gz
$tar xf Ocsinventory-Agent-XXX.tar
$cd Ocsinventory-Agent-XXX
$./ocsinventory-agent --devlib

If you want to create a module, use the --debug flag and turn of the server mode with --local /tmp or --stdout

This page could also be tagged: "custom XML", "extend ocsinventory-agent"